My old school ID photo changed after I revised my past

The story

A few months ago, I realized that revising my past would help me create a better self-concept in the now, that it would be easier for me to believe that I am X (happy, successful, loved, etc.) if I had always been X.

I read a lot of revision success stories here on reddit and got very motivated, so I decided to write a new story of my whole life. I started scripting and changing all the external events, other ppls behavior towards me as well as my own choices that I think lead to a negative self-concept. I felt really good writing and reading my new stories which was my goal: changing my feeling about myself and my past. But a few days later I accidentally stumbled upon some “physical evidence” of my revision, so here is some context.

Puberty hit me hard; I lost interest in school when I started high school, my grades were really bad, I started doing drugs, my looks deteriorated (I gained some weight and had a lot of acne), my love life was unhappy, I got depressed, felt as a loser etc. So I changed this period into “I was happy in high school, I had good grades, had a lot of fun with my friends but did less drugs, didn’t suffer cause of unrequited love but found an even better boyfriend, I was beautiful, my parents loved me”, stuff like that. I wrote all of this in detail, describing how I felt, and how my choices and external events affected me in a positive way and made me the person who I am today.

At the same time, I started clearing some physical reminders of my old-bad past, cleaning, throwing out some old things, throwing out my old journals (full of self-hate, and drama). During this process I came across an old photo of myself when I was 16. Now, for a time we had to wear an identity card with our photo while on school premises, and I remember very clearly how I looked in that photo, since I was looking at it every day. I can see it in my mind’s eye even now, I can see my resting bi*ch facial expression, the angle it was taken from, my hair and shirt, my shimmering acne. But after revising that part of my life, the photo I found (after 20 yrs) was different. It’s not just that my facial expression was different, the lines of my face were a bit different. The clothes and hair are the same, but I don’t look like myself, there’s no acne and I look confident & pretty (in one of the worst periods of my life in terms of beauty & self concept). I was amazed but thankful I found this little evidence and kept revising my whole story and throwing out things.

(I have a lot of photos from that period, and they all remained the same, but I interpreted this one as a “symbol of change” since it was directly related to high school, and I was wearing it in public so other ppl also saw me that way, if you know what I mean).

Being a natural born skeptic, a month or so afterwards I started thinking “maybe I imagined the whole thing. Maybe I just hated myself back then and thought I was ugly when in fact I wasn’t; maybe I do have the same facial expression but now that I’m older I think, oh, I looked cute back then”. So I took that photo again and scrutinized it - half expecting it will turn back to the photo I can still clearly see in my mind’s eye (the non-revised “real” photo I had with me every day) – but no! I didn’t imagine it and it didn’t turn back, lol. The photo in my hands is of another me. Much prettier than I was, with a facial expression I never had in my life (on any photo or caught a glimpse of in the mirror) and with somewhat different facial features.

The way I understand revision, whether the photo actually, physically changed is less important, since I obviously have a different, more positive reaction to myself from that period, which is the whole point. But the photo I remember looks so much different that I can’t help but believe it did actually change, lol.

I don't feel like my entire self-concept totally changed in line with everything I wrote in my revision, but I do feel better about myself in general, and I practice catching my old associations/reactions/thoughts and changing them according to my revised past/new self-concept, and this little SF “evidence” reminds me I’m on the right track.